David Seigel has published an essay, entitled Severe Tire Damage on the directions he'd like to see the Web take. The following is adapted from an email I sent him.
I do hope that a number of Mr. Seigel's concerns about the Web (ability to suggest colors, fonts, indentation, etc.) can be answered when style sheets are deployed widely. They should allow authors to specify, in considerable detail, the presentation of a document while maintaining the underlying structure, thereby allowing the information to be presented on devices the author has not considered.
However, I find the general tone of Severe Tire Damage to be at odds with what the Web could (might have?) become. I think the difference can be summarized with a couple of sentences (quoting from Severe Tire Damage):
As it turns out, white is a better background for reading text than gray is. I found this out by looking at books and discovering that no books are printed on gray paper. If you are looking at photographs, black or dark gray are good background colors.
The Web is not a new form of book, any more than TV was a new form of
radio. Just because a white background is good for books (or does
this have something to do with the manufacture of paper?), it doesn't
follow that white backgrounds are good for the Web. Indeed, just
because things have been done in manner X (whatever that
may be) in traditional print doesn't mean that's the way they should
be done on the Web.
FWIW, I dislike white backgrounds on computer screens intensely
because they give me a headache. Oh, and astronomers typically use
negative prints (in which stars appear as black and the sky as white)
because it is easier to see fine detail that way.
<lazio@spacenet.tn.cornell.edu>